Recursion

just stopped at,” he said. “You want it to convert the nickel iron sea into copies of itself.”

“Come on, Herb, you can do better than that. What about the VNMs already there? They’ll be trying to convert your VNMs back again.”

“I know. I suppose you’ve got my VNM transmitting the friend code.”

Robert nodded. “I could have done, but I didn’t bother. Remember Lesson One of VNM warfare, Herb: as long as your machines are converting the opposition at a faster rate than they are converting back, you’re going to overwhelm the Enemy in the end. It’s not about initial numbers, it’s about the conversion vector. You want it pointing in your direction.”

Herb spooned coffee into the pot and poured nearly boiling water over the grounds. He nodded thoughtfully.

“I see. But what’s the point? Once the Enemy AI figures out what you’re doing, it will just release a machine a bit faster at reproducing than mine was. They’ll get converted back and we’ll have achieved nothing.”

Robert’s faint smile widened to a big white grin. “We’ll just have to keep the Enemy AIs concentrating on something else then, won’t we?”

He looked back up at the viewing fields. “You’d better hurry up with your coffee. We jump just as soon as this ship hits point one lights.” He checked his watch. “That’s in about fifteen seconds,” he added.

Herb hurriedly pressed the button on the coffee pot and the water shivered in a complex pattern, sending the grounds spiraling to the bottom to be held there. He carried the pot and his glass cup back to the sofa facing Robert’s and sat down, placing the pot on the parquet floor just by his feet. Holding the cup tightly in his hands, he gazed up at the ceiling viewing field. Robert had set a large crimson circle expanding across a 2-D slice of starscape. A gold marker, just off center, indicated their ship’s position. A second gold marker lit up, halfway between the ship and the trailing edge of the bubble.

“The second marker is where we’re jumping to. They should assume we’re somewhere in the crimson circle at the moment.”

“Cunning.”

“I know. But we won’t be able to pull this trick too often, mind. Okay, hold onto your coffee, we’re going to jump…”

Herb bit his bottom lip…

Their reinsertion was accompanied by a series of flashes so powerful they tripped out the vision on the viewing fields. Twice the rear fields dimmed, then the left-hand fields, then the portals in the floor at Herb’s feet. Robert thoughtfully plotted the explosions on a section of the viewing field just above Herb’s head. Ripples formed in the dark surface of Herb’s coffee. As he watched, the tiny waves began to interfere with each other and form a fizzing pattern of brown bubbling liquid. Herb stared at the cup with morbid fascination. The ship must be undergoing incredible accelerations for this effect to be noticeable inside the cabin. He dreaded to think what was happening to the fluids inside his own body. The butterflies in his stomach would have steel wingtips at the moment.

“Got it,” said Robert, animation returning to his face. “Wiped the security net. That took longer than I expected. It’s a good thing we were through here earlier on. There are cut-down copies of my intelligence nested in the processors of a lot of the machinery in this system. Not strong enough to effect a change on their own, but they were helpful in the fight…”

“We were through here earlier on?” said Herb.

“Of course, when we scouted the territory. All those saboteurs we planted…”

Herb felt shaken. He remembered Robert’s earlier demonstration, his simulation of their bodies splitting in two and splitting in two as they sailed through the galaxy.

“How many of us are there?” he asked in a tiny voice.

Robert shrugged. “I’ve no idea anymore. You haven’t grasped it yet, have you Herb? This war is about reproduction. Anything that can make a copy of itself does so, or else it gets swamped.”

Herb sipped coffee without tasting it. He needed something to do to distract himself.

“Herb, if you think the battle we’re currently engaged in looks frantic, you should see what it looks like from Machine Level.”

Robert quickly scanned the viewing fields, his dark face half hidden in the pastel glow of the displays.

“Still, everything looks okay at the moment. We’ve achieved a balance of sorts, so I think we’re ready to hit the planet’s surface.” He assumed a serious expression. “I’ll warn you now, we’re going to jump down there using the warp drive.”

“What?” Herb almost spilled coffee in his lap. “What if you miscalculate? A fraction of a decimal place out and we could end up slamming into the ground! Isn’t jumping directly down to a planet incredibly dangerous?”

Robert shrugged. “Normally I’d say yes. However, given our current circumstances, I think that a close proximity warp jump is the least of our worries.”

Down at Machine Level:

The entity known as Robert Johnston was far beyond what humans understood to be a personality construct. Unlike the crude copies of itself that had been sent out into the linear and pseudo parallel processing spaces of the Enemy Domain, the personality construct resident in the robot body was of a super parallel non-Turing design that human minds could not begin to comprehend. Its like was not scheduled to be seen in human space for at least another two hundred years.

Super parallel non-Turing: in other words, Robert Johnston could think about many things at once.

To Robert Johnston, reality was a series of interlocking layers. At the moment, for example, he could see the dissipating warp field still shimmering around the ship yet well below the threshold that would cause anomalies for anything crossing the boundary into normal space.

Another part of him had interfaced with a minor security net on the planet which saw the universe as a three-color array of threats, friends and undecideds. That particular Robert was busily engaged in slotting the ship into the “friends” column.

Part of Robert Johnston could even see the world through eyes similar to Herb’s.

Using those senses, its robot body appeared to be sitting in a warm patch of sunlight cast by the ceiling viewing fields. Robert called this a human view. Such a slow view. Herb sat opposite him, anxiously looking from viewing field to viewing field with the speed of a snail in aspic.

And then there was that other way of looking at humans…

Robert Johnston could see Herb as a pattern of feelings and emotions that even Herb himself was not always aware of. He read the tension evident in his shoulders as a standing wave of electrical impulses, heard the fear in his chest by the rapid pattern of his heartbeat.

He could look deeper. He saw how, as Herb gazed around at the friendly warmth of this new planet, he was for a moment taken back to that day, weeks ago, when he had boarded his spaceship to make the return journey to his converted planet. Herb was feeling a strong wave of something almost like nostalgia. Not just a wish to be home, safe, but something more: a realization that if he had his time over again, his life could be so much better.

In the middle of the battle, Herb was having a sudden insight into what a mess he had made of his life so far; how much of a waste it had been.

It was the emotion that Robert had been waiting to read in Herb. One that he had been leading him toward for the past eleven days.

Directly below the ship, a river of blue-grey machines crawled along a rocky channel. A seemingly never-ending parade of shuffling, stumbling cylinders being funneled through the U-shaped valley that ran in a straight line from horizon to horizon. One aspect of Robert Johnston guided his robot body to pick up the Mцbius VNM it had shown Herb earlier and then throw it out of the ship’s hatch to land in the parade of machines that crept through the valley underneath.